I've gotten tired of looking for cassette tapes, lugging a recorder around, and taking forever to archive my recordings, not to mention having to flip the tape in the middle of something. It's about time I entered the modern digital age...
I bought an Olympus DS-40 digital voice recorder. It has three sensitivity modes. The high-sensitivity setting is called lecture, medium-sensitivity is conference, and low sensitivity is called meeting.
I did a recording on stereo high quality mode last night and was quite impressed. Even without noise cancellation on, there is no hum that I can discern as in a tape recorder.
It has 17 hrs 20 min of recording time on stereo HQ mode. On extra high quality mode (Stereo XQ),
it has 8 hr 40 min of record time. For mono recording, you have HQ (high quality mode, 38 hrs 45 min), SP mode (standard recording, 68 hrs, 30 min) or
LP mode (long recording, 136 hrs 15 min).
For those who need such things (including me), it has a voice guidance option which makes the menus speak. I am impressed with the speech in the menus (a very clear British-sounding voice), and the thing plays music when turned on and off. The only thing it doesn't speak is the file selections. I hope this is useful info for anyone who is looking for a good digital recorder.